Renascence
by hell-whim
Summary: "Stop me if you've heard this before."  AU post-JE & EW
1. Ianto

**Timeframe:** Through the end of _Exit Wounds_ and _Journey's End_. AU after, ignoring all the specials and the events of _Children of Earth_**  
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**RENASCENCE**

_Ah, awful weight! Infinity  
>Pressed down upon the finite Me!<br>My anguished spirit, like a bird,  
>Beating against my lips I heard;<br>Yet lay the weight so close about  
>There was no room for it without.<br>And so beneath the weight lay I  
>And suffered death, but could not die.<em>

**Ianto**

_This door you might not open, and you did;  
>So enter now, and see for what slight thing<br>You are betrayed..._

Stop me if you've heard this before. A doctor, a captain, and a—

Wait. That's not it.

I mean to say that a knight, a queen, and a pawn set the board. But that's wrong, too. I'm terrible at jokes.

Okay. A doctor, a captain, and a faggot secretary walked into a pub. Two of them died a long time ago, and one was never really alive to begin with. I was the one on the far left.

The doctor—Doctor, actually, possessing no other name or occupation—turned immediately to a table in the back. The captain (Jack) exchanged short, ugly words with the faggot (me) and went to join the Doctor. There was a TV above the bar which had the keep's full attention, so I rapped my knuckles against the till. He was always more Owen's friend than any of ours, but he wasn't unkind.

"Two beers," I said.

"_Three_," the keep replied, plunking the bottles near my hand. He gestured to the Doctor with the point of his chin, like an accusing finger. "No-one sits for free."

I agreed and paid full. A tab would only have extended our temporary relationship, and I was terrible at those, too. I didn't look at the labels—nothing was named. Even the faces are indistinct now, blurred by the bottleneck of empty hours standing between us.

I mean to say that I am trying to remember how I got here from there.

I had crossed the room, maybe, from the end of the bar to the back of an empty townhouse. I could see myself sitting beside the pool table, rearranging a torn jacket.

"Get away. I'm not drunk enough for you yet."

I fingered the edge of my collar. It was clean, unmarred. Perhaps it had already scabbed over. I was remembering what could never possibly happen.

So instead I waited. The Doctor and Jack leaned easily into each other, arms entwined on the tabletop but not touching. I sat at the bar a moment too long, watching them. They could keep their secrets. When I returned, they broke apart, settling back in their chairs. The Doctor resumed his dust-drawing, perfect concentric circles woven together with indecipherable patterns. I set the bottles in the center of the smallest three. Whatever conversation they had planned fell apart after my approach, and so I drank, willing the silence to consume us.

The pub visits were habitual. Every few weeks the TARDIS would slam down in Cardiff, and the Doctor would come looking for Jack—less and less of him, it seemed, coiled into that coat with the collar pulled past his ears, all bent elbows and hunched shoulders. He never thought much of me.

When the Doctor began to talk, I drained my bottle and took Jack's, staring past his head to the television. There was an old match on, and a woman bent over the till who I might've known.

"I have dreams now," the Doctor muttered, picking at a gouge beneath his wrist. His eyes danced about, seeking our attention. "Terrible things...beautiful. I see Davros and Dalek Caan and the Cascade. I write equations in my sleep and wake with my fingers covered in ink."

He sighed.

"I never dreamed before."

"Nightmares," I murmured, expelling my required participation for the evening. The woman left the bar, opening an unseen door, and disappeared up a flight of unfinished stairs. I followed her up past her bed, to the bath and a cache of coins she was siphoning from the till.

I mean to say that I saw all this in my head, an illusionary tract that would end if I could only close my eyes.

"Emily thinks so. She tells me that it's too much sugar before bed."

He laughed in a self-deprecating manner and swept his hand across the designs, obscuring them. He gave a contemplative look to the untouched bottle. He was waiting for response, a machine that relied on input to function. Jack was his faithful operator.

"What do you think it means?"

"I don't know. I don't think I want to know."

"Then why tell us?"

They hadn't heard me. The Doctor turned, glaring out our muddied window at the people who passed quietly along the street. Work had ended for everyone else. They had homes lingering.

"I wonder what they do all day," he said, contemptuous. "How they can live with themselves, so empty and shallow. I wonder how they could ever sleep."

I was wondering how long I'd have to let Jack fuck me before I could crawl back to my flat. He liked to think he didn't sleep but he did, when he was sated or drugged or bored enough. I wasn't sure which of the three I was aiming for, only that I escaped before one or two in the morning. I had laundry waiting in the machine, and there was a stack of books by my bed I kept thinking to finish.

I mean to say that I felt as empty and shallow as the people that the Doctor so reviled.

The keep refused me a fifth round, and I stumbled into my chair again, hours later. I squinted at the Doctor and saw nothing.

I mean to say that he had left, having laid all his burdens on us. I reached out and couldn't find Jack either.

"We're leaving," he said, voice tight and closed.

In the car, I slumped against the window, nodding through a fog of intoxication. Jack had left the music off, but I couldn't keep still—right to left I rolled, fingers twisted into the damp fabric of my trousers. From below I could see only the sharp downward cut of his mouth, the muscles of his jaw twitching. He was angry with me for getting so drunk.

"You _missed_ it," I sighed, as the turn took a nosedive and disappeared over Jack's shoulder.

"You can't be left alone."

"I don't need a fucking sitter," I snapped, shoving his arm from the center console. Newtonian in response, my head cracked into the window. Blood blossomed across the glass.

"Dammit, Ianto!"

His driving never helped. He slammed into the curb and reached over to help.

"Don't touch me!"

I hit the latch somehow. I was pushing at his hands and leaning back. The fall to the pavement was short.

I expected pool cues and found none, so I examined my abused shirt. It was bleeding.

"Ianto!"

He struggled with the key and then gave up too easily, setting one foot on the pavement.

I was sick of myself and him—how terribly disgusting I looked, sprawled across the curb with my torn jacket and blood sprinkling my collar. The skin across my knuckles had split in whorls.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Jack shouted. "What's going on?"

He'd asked already, many times in the weeks since I went to see a doctor and wouldn't tell him why. That doctor was a nice Korean woman who spoke to me slowly and with kindness. She had asked me to come back. I hadn't.

The other foot exited as well, steadying him.

"Ianto, you're scaring me. Please come home."

I was sitting up against a bin, rearranging myself against the tide pull.

"That place isn't _home_. I hate it."

I mean to say that I was rebuilding defenses, shutting Jack out for the last time.

He had made it around the front of the SUV and stood in the glare of one headlight, staring down at me. I looked like nothing at that angle.

"Don't you ever say _anything_?" I snarled, a ridiculous question that my tongue twisted over. I might have been crying.

"Just come back."

I was staring at a little boy tugging impatiently at his hand, unnoticed. He wanted to play catch, before they were called to dinner. Jack didn't know that. He never asked. The lovely doctor came to mind again, with her apologies.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Jones. I'm so sorry."

I mean to say that I was falling to pieces faster than Jack could ever fix me.

I was approaching the end. I could see it then, just past the broken grate.

"Get away," I snapped. "I'm not drunk enough for you yet."

He recoiled, less from the words than the way I said them. I didn't care anymore how it ended. He just had to leave.

I mean to say that I knew. I wanted him to go. I didn't want him to see.

"Fine," he said. "Stay in the gutter."

The SUV squealed around the corner, and I was already gone. I pulled myself up the pavement at a hunched crawl, fingers crushed into rough grouted grooves. I cradled the closest wall. I couldn't remember the number, and squinting helped none.

"We weren't always this terrible," I told the wall. "I remember loving him, once."

That building had no interest, so I turned to the next expectantly.

"We're going to be alright. Every couple has their fights. We're going to adopt."

A woman pushing a pram gave me no notice. I tried to tell her that it wasn't April anymore.

"We won the war!" I shouted after her retreating back. "Go home, if you still can!"

I saw her mangled torso scattered in seven oversized bins and turned another corner.

"You're following. Stop following!"

I mean to say that I wanted to be alone just then, for once. I could never get what I really wanted.

He was curled beneath a lamppost like a dark cat, clawed and patient. Obedient to the end, I let him approach.

"We never spent any time together," he lamented, making a sudden twitchy movement towards my chest.

I felt nothing at first. Pain is in the acknowledgment, and I stared dumbly at the line just beneath my sternum. Fingers scissoring at either side, I tried to pinch the slash closed. I could not be contained and neither could he, following my backward descent with grace, as a dancer dipping his nervous partner. He chopped a gleeful circle around my heart and then stood, face obscured in the shadow of the lamppost halo.

"How marvelous-brilliant-fantastic!"

He chain-smoked each word to its filter, tongue sliding experimentally over his teeth, as though tasting them against each syllable.

I mean to say that he sounded wrong.

The knife he wiped carefully on my jacket, fraying a small stitch near my elbow. He curled my fingers around the handle, smiling.

"No need for that just now. You're the next-to-next-to-last piece. The antepenultimate."

"I know," I said.

I mean to say that I didn't, really, but didn't know what else to say.

He pushed up his sleeve, checking an imaginary watch.

"We've little time," he said. "Care to chat?"

It could have been someone else entirely who was drowning there. The woman, perhaps, shackling those stolen coins to her ankle.

"It took ever so long to get here, you know," he continued, settling at my side. His hand hovered above my heart. He was patient. "But I'm clever. Clever by half, whatever that means."

I closed my eyes. I opened them again, slowly.

"Are you bored?" he asked, wounded. "I'm sorry. You know I'm terrible at conversation. I'm trying to get better. I'm trying to get better at a lot of things, come to that."

He flipped his wrist and showed me a bright red patch on the underside.

"I keep scratching," he said with a frown. "As though one day the skin will finally flake away, and I'll become something new."

In every movement was a twitch, a slight tumble of pain or confusion. Fragments of phrases seemed jammed in his throat, desperately seeking escape before he could release them.

"What are you?" I asked, peeling each word from a copper tongue.

"A hand," he replied. "The Hand of God. Or, well, _a_ god, anyway. The lonely god. Not so lonely."

He smiled.

"Don't you remember? I am the unhappy wolf."

He unfolded a sheet of paper from nowhere, slipping dirty spectacles from his pocket. I could make nothing of it. The figures danced beneath his fingers.

"These are very precise calculations, you know. Or don't know. I don't suppose you moonlight as a mathematician?"

"No."

"Well, that's unfortunate."

I sucked in a shallow breath.

"What are you waiting for?"

He changed, shouting.

"I'm always waiting. Always!"

He pushed off the wall and set his feet at my head. He became the sky, black and starless.

I mean to say that he obscured everything else. He was all I could hear anymore.

"You can't understand. You just can't, because I won't explain. I'm sorry. I know that I ought to outline every detail of my overarching plan to you, but I've never felt the compulsion to monologue quite like he did."

He picked at his cuffs.

"It's the suit. I was never this existential in brown."

A knight and a pawn meet at the diagonal for tea. Neither knows why, yet, or when they'll be leaving. It wasn't a joke at all.

"I'm taking up all your time," he said miserably, stepping away. "I'm sorry."

He frowned and walked back to the lamppost, stopping only on its far side.

"You've lasted much longer than the other. Still clinging to something of this?"

He turned back, curling an inquisitive tongue over his teeth.

"What is it that you want to keep? All your friends are dead, and Jack hates you, and you've nothing, nothing to hope for. All your decisions have led you here, you know."

"I know."

I was sitting in the crowded pub again. I saw for a moment the Doctor's drawing, until his other half reached in and shook it from view.

"I didn't have that. Every choice," he said. "I didn't even get to pick my own name. She wanted to remind me."

I could no longer see his feet or my own, and his return to my side was a ghostly saunter, disjointed and irritable. I watched myself crawl along the brick behind him, screaming obscenely.

"He _chose_ that life," the not-Doctor snarled. "Let him live it awhile. See how great the mortal coil is, just when you're shuffling off the edge."

His eyes flicked to mine.

"No offense."

He crouched at my level. He hadn't blinked yet.

"Do you forgive me?" he said earnestly. "If I say sorry enough, will you forgive me anything? Because I'm sorry, Ianto. I am so sorry."

His eyes were the same and different, as he leaned in.

"He gave me that knife. He gave me all of this."

He pulled the handle from my loose fingers and pressed it down again. I feel pain.

I mean to say that I remember now where I am.

"You have no _idea_," he says, twisting the knife and twisting the knife, "how this _hurts_ me. How this hurts _me_."

I am arranging my head on Jack's pillow, saying, "I've such a headache, you know—I think I'll sleep for ages." Jack's hands are tracing the outline of the knife, guiding it into my stomach, stitching time through the wound. "Sleep," he says, smiling. "I'll be here when you wake up again."

There is sunlight behind his head, blinding me. Everything washes gold, then white and empty.

I mean to say that I am dying.

He is standing above me now, sadly, waiting for something. I am cold. I reach for his hand.

"This isn't so terrible," he promises. "It could have been worse."

I have so many questions, and so many answers. I am thinking of Owen. I am wondering how to say goodbye.

"There was more, I thought," I say, though I don't know why. "Wasn't there?"

I don't know if he can hear me.

"This isn't so bad. It wasn't so bad."

I mean to say that everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.


	2. Emily

**Emily**

_I will look at cliffs and clouds  
><em>_With quiet eyes,  
><em>_Watch the wind bow down the grass,  
><em>_And the grass rise._

My rheumatic knees had kept me close to bed of late, so the Doctor had taken to venturing out alone again. He could hardly be expected to remain forever at my side, of course, caged between doors and lives. So he went—and brought me things, when he thought of it: souvenirs and trinkets of experiences I might have liked and, instead, had lost. Sometimes he left with the purpose of abandoning me, to save himself, and sometimes he would scour the distant future for cures, for therapies, for small extensions to a waning contract. Immortality comes for only such as are fit for it, though, and each time he returned, full of remorse, to lay his head in my lap and sleep.

All our other days, however, when he twisted ephemerally between weariness and restlessness, he would take us to Cardiff. Wales was new at first, and welcome: I had only been to the Continent once or twice as a girl, when the spiraling last days of the empire cast on everything a lurid pall, and the air choked us with anticipation. But Samuel had cared little for the old country—possessing no stronger connection than a festering grand-uncle somewhere in the Bavarian hills—and it was unbecoming to travel without one's children, motherhood being then among my many chains.

The Doctor would sometimes say we ought to visit Bavaria, often when we had newly left his friends or family or current wife. The balance of our disparate lives troubled him, and I could offer the only reply I had ever possessed.

"Of course, my darling."

I had accompanied the Doctor into Cardiff only once, during our early days. On that visit I met the imposing captain and his companion, a sour-faced boy of few words and fewer inflections. I found them both ugly in their unhappiness, and having little purpose left for the etiquette of forced familiarity, I did not meet them again. The Doctor still went, out of some misguided need for stability.

I say misguided not because stability is to be shunned—how often had I awoken cold and dreadfully ill, demanding an audience with a husband who was dead and children who cared little for a kidnapped mother? The Doctor nursed me through these confusions, faithfully. I could not reproach him, even to the fools he gathered around himself as family. No, indeed: I say misguided because these vagrants could hardly be counted to care for themselves, let alone shoulder the concerns of a thoughtless god.

Any interruption of theirs could never be unexpected. The captain, seized by fits of boredom, would abandon his post and his subservient lover, or come gallivant with us rather than sit out a row. So the message awaited us on our return from Greece. Cardiff called, and the Doctor answered: I could not expect his return before morning, when he would stumble through the door, misty and discontent but quiet once more.

"I can't think," he said, unprompted, from between the shelves. A fire crackled in the grate and made shadow-puppets of his dancing fingers as he fumbled through the towering rows.

"There is no need for fuss. I will be perfectly alright for a few hours."

"I know," he said, reappearing with a stack of books under his arm. The inconstant light masked the unhappy hollows of his face, where worry had woven lace-like beneath the skin. "Will these do?"

"Of course, my darling," I said. "Aren't you expected?"

He made some noncommittal noise, arranging the books within my reach.

"It's only been a few days, for them."

"All the more reason," I said. "Without so much as an explanation—"

"You worry too much, you silly old crone."

But his tone held only affection, and he flattened his hair with one spindly hand.

"I've left the mobile on, if you need anything."

"I never have need."

He smiled, kissed my head, and pulled his coat from the mantlepiece. Gently, I folded my needlework into the brown carpetbag at my knee.

"I love you. Don't get lost."

"Love you, too," he agreed. "Get some sleep."

"I will sleep when I am dead," I reminded him, "as with you."

He smiled again and left without further farewell. When he returned, he would be drunk, distant, depressed—an intermittent affliction cured only by the swirling solitude of the Vortex.

We went wherever _he_ wanted, mostly—I'd never been taught to offer a public opinion, and we both knew I was simply grateful for the ride. He did his best to keep my appointments, though hitting off the mark from time to time. I called it playing in the rough, and he would scowl, working a broken pump beneath the console, bare hands pitted with grease.

He adored me, though, having wandered peaceably alone for a decade before our first encounter. I had been his Companion for nearly twice that length and would remain so until my death, an unspoken decision at which we had arrived unanimously during my first month aboard the TARDIS.

I heard the snap of the door, distantly. The silence of the library closed in around me, and I gingerly rose for a walk.

We had met in New York in 1928, at the climax of my American life. An opulent little circus of my eldest's design—his newest Irish wife parading the Doctor as her newest pet. He had been unfortunate enough to save her from the water or the theater or the poor, or something equally calamitous, and was coerced into staying for the evening. He suffered the party on her arm, a reluctant trophy until my amusement passed and I offered the shelter of my company.

He was eccentric enough to satisfy the gathering, and when they had finished with him, we took a turn along the pier. We spoke of his most recent losses and his wanderings. I took him at his fantastical word, having spent the years since my husband's death sedentary and depressed. Real or imagined, any world surpassed the monotony of my children's parlor walls, of my grandchildren's sullen indifference, of my quiet garden walks.

Samuel had always promised adventure. New money was never welcome, so we entertained ourselves, latching onto gypsy caravans and the yachts of drunk old sea captains. He built me a dozen houses in a dozen countries, each identical to our first Dakota farmhouse. Influenza took him, in 1918.

The TARDIS buzzed lazily as I passed the console.

"Not a worry, my darling," I said. "I'm off to bed soon. Wish me good night?"

I took the echo as the returned sentiment and patted the worn bench with affection. With a hum, the kitchen appeared to my left, and I smiled.

"Doctor!" I called behind me. "I'm about to make a _kettle_ of tea and leave all of the fixings on the counter!"

The only answer is the gentle rap of the TARDIS door, ajar.

"Careless," I murmured, unsurprised. "Why ever do I let you leave?"

He had left his spectacles, again, and a sheet of calculations atop the console. I unfolded it: a series of circles and lines arranged in a precise pattern. The paper was ratty, rippled, stained with brownish fingerprints. I folded it into my pocket and took up the spectacles. Something reddish—jam, perhaps—smudged one lens.

Stowing these as well to prevent the inevitable accident, I crossed the grate and stood at the open door a moment, breathing in the empty city night. We were parked close to the edge—I could see only the water, cool and black and calm, stretched far beneath the quiet lights. A stiff wind rose up, and I pressed my weight against the door.

"Careless," I said again and shuffled into the kitchen.

The console room had not suffered the Doctor's malaise as the rest of the ship had—one could hardly round a corner without smacking headlong into some discarded pile of the Doctor's past. The occasional locked door did me no harm, but as I reflected, unwinding one of his sweaters from the spoons, he did himself no favors in continual flight.

How many of his family had I met, dead now, and how many lost friends? How often did he turn his head with a smile, only to conceal within himself a sadness unleashed later as fruitless anger? I could not bear to see him so tortured, and he knew this, so he hid from me as well. I often wondered at his life, after my death.

From beneath a set of torn gloves, I extracted the old tin kettle. Teacups behind the flour and saucers across from the apples—I gathered my supplies, set the kettle to boil, and stood. The gentle rusticity of the kitchen hid a platoon of impossible machines: a replicator, a microwave, a vast freezing room, an assortment of electric oddities. Such stark modernity had terrified me at first, the Doctor's previous Companion having been of the late 4600s, but the TARDIS soon softened herself for me: plush carpet for the halls, worn chairs for the library, bronze and brass and mahogany paneling.

I watched the water until it boiled. The Doctor's troubles weighed on me, turning my own melancholy inward. Samuel filled my thoughts. Thirty years stood between us, and already I had forgotten the sound of his voice. Although the Doctor had produced photographs for me, of my children and their children and what old friends that still stubbornly clung to life—I had nothing but one stiff, grim-lipped portrait of Samuel, taken just before our marriage: he faced at an angle from the camera, collar starched high, a slight blurriness of the mouth betraying the smile which always seemed to lurk just beneath his surface.

I had been seized by a delusion, around the twentieth return of our parting, that I should see Samuel one last time. The Doctor was easily persuaded by my grief, mourning then the expected demise of a wife, and we foolishly danced the Vortex into 1916.

Such an ugly occasion: to be constantly so close to him and yet withheld, for fear of exposure. There could be no explanation—though by my admission, my looks had fallen into disrepair, I could never be mistaken for another. I had forgotten that we spent the summer in Morocco, and the heat wore on us all. There was no accidental encounter, no brief meeting of hollow hands—the Doctor and I stood on a quiet beach and screamed our unhappiness at each other.

I selected my tea with an apathy that might drive the Doctor to furious distraction. The ambient hum of the ship warmed my feet and kept me steady.

We had since agreed that neither bore the blame, but we never spoke of it. I spent six weeks with my middle child, and the Doctor tore off to the distant future, to Cardiff, to his precocious captain. When he returned, remorseful and spent by the storm, I granted forgiveness without a word and rejoined him. He had never left me since.

My invalid years now waxing, the Doctor found himself consumed with little more than a desire to speak. I could never ask what he did not offer—his affairs were his, until they intersected with my own. What little pieces he shared were just that: fragments of stories and encounters without context, presented as though I were a mere extension of him, collecting data and filing each memory away for later study.

Just the other day, after rousing himself from yet another nightmare, he began to speak of a great cavernous ship onto which the whole of his family had gathered, a place where he had met the limits of himself. I could make no sense of it but to pick out the names I remembered and match them to descriptions: Rose and Jackie and Donna—of each he rarely spoke and, even then, in pain. Martha I had met, and the captain of course, and Mickey Smith, as well—company I never cared to keep.

The Doctor spoke of himself in halves, and as he talked, he wrote circles and lines, the same unreadable message as occupied the abandoned page resting in my pocket.

A holiday or celebration—his impossible family gathered together at last, surrounding and supporting him as they vanquished an old enemy and saved the universe, or some other equally dramatic event, at which my respectful awe was expected and given. The story always ended there, the audience expected to create its own denouement. I knew hints: Rose gone once more, Donna broken beyond repair, the captain sweeping away into the sunset, and the Doctor, split in two. Frustration, depression, but most of all, grief—I imagine he had spent decades in each stage, having at last reached the third and would drink and dance himself through to the end.

I had dreamt just recently of the Doctor and I, strolling along the beach in Morocco, hand in hand. He had been walking for a great long while before I joined him, and now I was soon to part, pulling impatiently at his grip as I watched the gentle roll of the waves. I intended to swim, and he clutched at me, fighting, pointing back to all those sets of prints weaving in and out with his own—evidence of who had walked beside and then abandoned him. I would have to cross his path to leave, and he held tighter, his hand becoming a claw which ripped my skin in the effort. I uncurled like a ribbon, spooling away, and he pulled and pulled until I tore loose and floated, serene, out to sea.

My spoon clattered against the saucer, and I returned. The room reformed around me: counter, icebox, and stove solidifying, reaffirming the old ache. I replaced the kettle and turned back to the table. He—but no, not at all, a half perhaps—stood in the door, hands concealed politely in his pockets.

"He isn't here," I said in a voice that was not my own. He said nothing, gesturing to the table, and I sat. The TARDIS gave no warning: she was fooled or welcomed the impostor.

"How marvelous," he said. "A glitch. Who are you?"

"Emily," I said.

"A new Companion."

"Yes."

He crossed the room, examining the kettle, the counter-top, the empty stove. He pulled open every drawer, took every jar between his hands and shook, lifted lids and tasted the contents—his tongue hovering serpentine between his thin blue lips.

"Fascinating," he muttered again and again, testing the curve of his thumbnail on a clementine. I curled my hands around my teacup, ignoring the burn. My nearest weapon was a dull butter knife: useless. I had seen the Doctor take bullets with the barest falter in his step.

"So different, alike, together. I've never been here, but I remember it all the same."

"You should go."

"No," he said. "I think not."

The best weapon, more than a half-hour's walk in my condition, was hidden in the Doctor's room: a reformed Dalek cannon, stolen from the bowels of some derelict station we had visited only once. I examined the well-walked corridors behind a flat facade: I could see every path to every weapon and every scenario of rising from my chair and saving myself. The abstracts of possibility unfolded behind my eyes.

"Well, I'm three-for-three now," he grinned. "Funny how quickly you lot figured me out."

"No," I corrected gently. "I don't know who you are. I know who you are not."

He gestured himself into the chair across from me and sat with limbs spread around the table.

"Are you frightened?"

"Not yet."

"Fantastic answer."

He pulled a thin blade from his jacket, bent slightly at the tip, and set it between us.

"I didn't predict this," he said. "I had no idea you were here. How exciting."

"I could tell you to take whatever you want, or I could beg you to leave."

"But it would have no bearing on my intentions," he said cheerfully. "I am a brain in a vat, swimming circles through an endless cave of my own design."

The cup rattled, and I released my grip, flattening my fingers on the tabletop.

"Nonetheless, you've kept me."

"No," he corrected gently. "I've not killed you yet. There's a difference."

"What do you want?"

"To ask all the questions."

He laughed, showing teeth and a pale tongue.

"Your next question will be directed towards my intentions," he said. "Having mentioned them briefly, I will outline them no further. Feast on curiosity, Emily. It separates you from the animals."

He stood—it seemed as though he had not moved at all, simply manipulating the walls and the chair to become massive and vertical.

"Conundrum," he said. "The penultimate approaches. I need time, which you don't have, and life, which you've already given."

"Please," I said, and my voice was so small, "please."

"You can't stay," he said firmly. "You have, as the cliché goes, seen too much."

His eyes sought mine and held them: I stared into a singularity.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I mean that. I really am sorry."

"I was going to see my children tomorrow," I said. "It's been six months. He promised to take me."

I could see—_can _see—the whole of my life before us: a thin white thread stretched between withered fingers, scissors poised for the cut. His hand on my shoulder is familiar and heavy.

"Close your eyes," he says gently. "It's like falling asleep."


End file.
